Monday, July 30, 2012

Don't let
the giallo-esque title fool you, The Devil with Seven Faces is far from an
murder mystery and yeah, I would say it's a completely different genre. The
title might fool us, but don't get scared away from this pretty standard but
well-made crime-thriller directed by gun-for-hire Osvaldo Civirani. He dabbled
in every genre possible, from pepulm to erotic, but I think this was his only
adventure into crime. Not a bad little movie either, but I'll get back to why
it's bad and why it's not the best movie ever made either.

Carroll
Baker is Julie, a normal girl trying to live a normal life - until suddenly
several strange men is starting to stalk her, taking photos of her and behaving
very badly. Thankfully she has two men to do the protecting, her lawyer Dave
(Stephen Boyd) and her new boyfriend Tony (George Hilton). After a while they
understand what has happen. Julie's sister Mary is accused to have stolen a
million dollar diamond on London
and other criminals thinks Julie is Mary! Soon her life is at stake and
everyone around her lives more and more dangerous, and only Julie can bring
back the diamond from her sister and make the terror stop.... or?

Or? Yeah,
that's the key word in most Italian thrillers from the 70's and this is no
exception. It actually has a form of giallo-esque atmosphere, which is also
helped by the groovy score, but the movie itself is one of those twisty
caper/heist-thrillers, but from a different point of view. This is a quite
original take and the story more or less works by itself because the set-up and
concept is so good.

The best
thing with this film is of course the actors. Caroll Baker is always excellent
and works fine in the lead as the lady in need, Luciano Pigozzi has a smaller
part as a baddie but is always good. George Hilton, maybe a little bit on
routine here - remember he made tons and tons of giallos and other
crime-related films during the 70's and this was probably just one in the
bunch, another paycheck - even if the Amsterdam-location must have been a nice
addition to the job. What makes me really happy is the presence of Stephen
Boyd. I had no idea he was in the movie and he's nice to see him so relaxed and
cool - compared to all the big budget historical extravaganzas he made in Hollywood. He's a
splendid actor, VERY underrated and fits good in this form of film. Like so
many other former Hollywood actors who got older he did a lot of European
movies during this time, but never became that big in Italy.

I wish I
had more to say about The Devil with Seven Faces, but I don't. Well, yeah...
the reason why it's not the best movie ever made is that everything smells like
a gun-for-hire production. There's no personality in the production, like
everyone was there to get their pay check and that's it. Even the action
scenes, especially the car chase, is very sloppily made and relies mostly on
speed-up footage of cars chasing each other, and it NEVER looks good. I can't
imagine why they couldn't find another solution, or just spend some more time
shooting the scene - angles could help a lot making it look faster and more
dangerous. Now it's just point-and-shoot and it's crap.

Still, it's a good little thriller. It will not
revolutionize your world and you might even skip it for more important titles,
but if you find it cheap and trust my review, give it a try sometime - at least
for good old Stephen Boyd's sake.

Sunday, July 29, 2012

Brian De
Palmas controversial thriller might be a bit too mainstream to be included here
on the Ninja Dixon blog. The reason why it's here now it's because it's one of
my favourite films by De Palma, and that's a hard choice because I love most of
what he's done (I tried watch Scarface again recently but had to turn it off
because of Al Pacino's shitty acting, but that's a different story and it's
better for my safety that I keep quiet about my opinion). Dressed to Kill feels
a lot like a Giallo and it's filled with sex and violence. De Palma himself
calls it a "dark sexual fantasy", and that's probably the best
description of it.

For once I
will skip to tell the story, because it's more or less a version of Alfred
Hitchcock's Psycho, with some of the same twists - but a lot bloodier and with
more sex. De Palma has always been more European in a sense, but mixed with the
American way of doing everything a bit too much. This is a marvellous
combination and makes Dressed to Kill maybe the ultimate "erotic
thriller" ever made, I mean - you have everything from Dario Argento's
stylish murders, Hitchcock's shocks and twists and the tackiness of every
American musical ever made. What's even more fascinating is how this is a skin
flick, an exploitation movie with big stars and big budget. Full frontal
nudity, dirty talk and ultra-violence - something you could only see on 42nd street before
this hit the big screens. It's not a rip-off, it's a homage to everything De
Palma loves.

Originally
he wanted to do Cruising and the rumour says he even wrote a script based on
that story, but when he couldn't get the rights to Gerald Walker's novel he
just took some of the ideas and transferred them to this new script. The result
became the second most controversial thriller of 1980, of course after William
Friedkin's own version of Cruising. But when Friedkin took a more serious
route, De Palma made a full-out gory, sex and over-the-top murder mystery
instead - and maybe that was for the best. Because in a "dark sexual
fantasy" you have a lot more freedom than in a production that is based on
extensive research and real locations and people. One similarity between
Cruising and Dressed to Kill is that both directors choose to let different
actors play the killer, than the "real" killer. These actors also
played other roles in both movies. I like this idea, it's clever and maybe some
would say it's a cheat. But hey, everything for suspense and tension yeah? The
Italians did this every damn day during the seventies. Another fine detail is
that its De Palma-veteran William Finley doing the voice of "Bobbi",
in just another way to confuse us - and those who's trying to catch the killer.

Dressed to
Kill deals with transsexual issues, in a quite negative twist also - but I
personally think the cause for the murders lays in something else than the
gender of the killer, like in Psycho - schizophrenia, multiple personalities
etc. The movie actually features a clip from The Phil Donahue Show, where
journalist and transgender person Nancy Hunt talks about being transsexual.
It's the only connection to realism in the whole movie. This interview was also
the thing the triggered De Palma to write Dressed to Kill. He did a lot of
research on transsexualism and became more and more fascinated by the thing
called "gender discomfort", which also caused some discomfort among his
friends: "I was at a dinner party, and I asked, quite innocently,
'Wouldn't it be terrific to dress up in women's clothes and go out and see how
people related to you? And everyone looked at me like I was a lunatic!" Happy
for us De Palma did make his movie on the subject, just not very correct and
proper.

I'm
probably not the only person who thought about this, but have you noticed the
interesting connection between Dressed to Kill, Blow Out and Body Double?
Except being very European and Hitchcockian thrillers of course. Blow Out
starts with a homage to b-slashers, with POV camera and an unknown assassin
going into a house and killing a woman in the shower. The end of Dressed to
Kill features a similar sequence, but this time a dream and not a
movie-in-a-movie, were the killer through POV breaks into a house and kills a
woman in the shower. Dressed to Kill
didn't only upset the trans-community and the women's right organizations, it
also gained negative attention because Angie Dickinson used a body double in
the infamous shower scene that starts the movie. Something that's actually very
visible and I'm sure De Palma somehow wanted to poke fun at this phenomena -
and then he makes a movie called Body Double which ends with a humours scene
where they need a body double during the making of a corny horror movie.

Saturday, July 28, 2012

Long time
since I watched a giallo, but finally - after a week of Jess Franco - I found
the time, early this morning, to sit down and watch Paolo Cavara's very
interesting Plot of Fear. My plan was to get my hands on it quiet a while ago
when Tom Skerritt visited Stockholm, but I never found it and kinda forgot
about it - until yesterday when a the nice DVD from Raro suddenly stared at me
from the shelves of a second hand store here in Stockholm. It's mine, I thought
and grabbed it faster than The Dark Knight Rises is a fiasco! The only movie by
Cavara I've seen before this one is Black Belly of the Tarantula, one of the
best giallis ever made. So how could he top that? With making one of the most
original and off-beat giallis I've seen.

Michele
Placido (more famous from the Italian TV-series La Piovra) is the sexually liberal
and slightly odd Inspector Gaspare Lomenzo, a young cop who's know in charge of
the investigation of The Fauna Club-murders. One by one the members of this
little private sex-club is killed in very various ways and it's impossible to
find any clue to who the killer is. Like all good giallis everything is
connected to art, and this time to the very macabre (I've read it myself as a
child) German children book Der Struwwelpeter, with the killer leaving one
drawing from the book at each murder site. Somehow a young woman, Jeanne (Corinne
Cléry), knows more than she wants to say - and it doesn't help that Lomenzo
falls in love with her, which could be a very bad idea...

That sounds
quite ordinary, yeah? Well, it's not. Plot of Fear is an oddity, mostly because
it spend so much time just showing us the life's these wonderful characters.
It's like Fellini made a low-key, violent, crime movie! Even the smallest part
is well-defined and funny, or tragic, and there's a lot of personality in each
and every extra in the background. Cavara didn't only create an interesting
murder mystery here, but also a colourful gallery of destinies. But fear not,
it also has a generous amount of murders - some of them bloody - and a couple
of twists and turns.

The
flashbacks to the Fauna Club is the best and could be something from a Tinto
Brass film. In one interesting sequence they sit and watch an production of the
Italian animator Gibba (aka Francesco Maurizio Guido), a very vulgar and sexual
detailed cartoon that looks like a mix between sci-fi and fantasy - what can
the title be? Let me know if you have any clue! The leader of the Fauna Club is
played by John Steiner, an excellent actor doing yet another of his classical
sleazebags. What a guy!

Tom
Skerritt has a very small part (I wonder how he ended up in this film?) and Eli
Wallach a bigger and more interesting part, as a mysterious private detective
who some of the Fauna Club-members contact when they realize they might get
killed. But I would say that this is Michele Placido and Corinne Cléry's movie,
because they rule in every scene they're in.

Plot of Fear is a closeted hippie-giallo with some
interesting political undertones and lots of murders. I really loved it. A
great thriller, a great drama and a fresh spin on a genre that needs that
little extra to be really interesting.

This will
be the last film of Jess Franco I will review for a while, mostly because it's
hard to find new superlatives for each new text. Franco often revisits same
themes and ideas and that makes many of these movies seem a bit similar after a
while, so I will end it for this time with another fantastic movie, Eugenie...the Story of Her Journey Into Perversion, as the DVD title says. The original
title is Marquis de Sade's 'Philosophy in the Boudoir', based on de Sade's text
by the same name, but honestly, both titles works very fine in the end. I have
a tendency to prefer Franco's dark sexual dramas before his lighter movies and
this is no different. Eugenie is a mature, intelligent drama with lots of
nudity and a wonderful cast. The story is as simple as genial...

Marie
Liljedahl plays plays Eugenie, the daughter of the rich businessman Mistival
(Paul Muller). Mistival's mistress is Madame Saint Ange (Maria Rohm) and she
makes him allow her to bring Eugenie to her private island for a weekend. There
her perverted stepbrother Mirvel (Jack Taylor) awaits them, and what begins as
a childish, drunken and weed-smoking day soon becomes more sinister when a cult
worshipping de Sade arrives and watches the Madame and Mirvel sexually use and
abuse the young Eugenie...

Being a
story based or inspired by de Sade (I never read any of his works) Eugenie is a
tasteful trip down sexually lane with some light spanking and whipping, tits
and asses, drug use and an intercourse or two. Quite far from the excessive
sleaziness Franco shot during the later seventies. This is both good and bad.
Good because it gives Franco more time to shoot a stunningly beautiful drama
and bad because maybe someone wants more sex when it comes to a movie like
this. For me, it doesn't matter. This is high-quality sleaze with some kind of
ambition to do more than just give the audience a hard-on.

Eugenie is
a trip to one of the circles of hell, an almost supernatural story about living
in a world about sex. Franco never says if this is a good or a bad thing,
there's not judging at all and the open, almost surreal, ending both reminded
me of The Beyond and NightmareCity, if you get my
point. It also echoes the later Countess Perverse in style and concept. I would
love to have been a fly on the wall on this shoot. First of all we have the
cast, the very talented Liljedahl, a Christopher Lee that had no idea (yeah
sure!) of what was going on, the producers wife, the wonderful Maria Rohm, making
it out with Jack Taylor, a gay man that probably have seen more pussy than few
other gay men!

Even today,
in 2012, Eugenie, feels very fresh and modern. If it had more gratuitous sex
maybe, but still. This is a movie that survived the years and still makes an
impact that fits both the cult squad and the arthouse-aficionados. It's
interesting how Franco had such a bad reputation from the beginning, because
most of his works I've seen is actually quite classy - and they easily would
gain more attention than his trashier production if we, the cult movie fans,
would demand more of our movies than just boobs, gore and goofy action scenes.

Eugenie...
the Story of Her Journey Into Perversion is another masterpiece, yeah, a
perfect piece of arthouse-sleaze.

Friday, July 27, 2012

First of
all, I would lie if I said I actually understood the story of The Devil Came from Akasava, but in some weird way I think that's the point with it all. It's
a spoof, a send-up, a caper with a lot of humour and of course made by Jess
Franco. Officially another Edgar Wallace story, but I'm not so sure it's really
one from the beginning. Maybe something Wallace's son wrote down on a napkin
once, just an idea, a few words and somehow
the German producers of got their hands on it. So what's it about? I'll give
you the basic structure, but that's all.

Somewhere
on a tropical location (really Alicante, Spain and the garden of an hotel) a
couple of scientists - Horst Tappert for example - find an amazing stone, or
metal, that both create huge damage to the people handling it, but also can
transform normal metals into gold - or something like that. Suddenly everyone
wants this stone, and one of the scientists goes missing and so is the stone. A
relative to the scientist, Rex (Fred Williams), starts to investigate but soon
finds out that everyone wants to kill everyone in this confusing mess of a
story!

I can't say
that The Devil Came from Akasava is Franco's best movie, not by a long-shot,
but it still holds a certain charm to entertain me. The best thing with it is
the cast, from Horst Tappert doing is normal robotic routine as Horst Tappert
to Soledad Miranda, in a quite small part, as a thief and maybe even a secret
agent. She's cool and beautiful, as usual! Paul Müller and Howard Vernon shows
up later in the story and both is perfect in their small parts. Fred Williams,
who was that guy? Anyone who knows? He looks good and had some talent, but he's
lost as an interview object. I want to hear his story! Someone, please?

The problem
- or maybe the point - is that the script is so damn convoluted. Everyone is fucking
up things for everyone else, friends becomes foes and foes becomes friends and
in the end... I'm not sure how it ends. This could be a part of the concept of
course, the movie has humour and a generous twinkle in the eye. One part I
really love is the Kiss Me Deadly-reference, the bag with the mysterious stone
that kills people with a strong light. The film could be a unofficial goofy sequel
to Robert Aldrich's classic noir-masterpiece...

Franco made
this at the same time as Vampyros Lesbos and She Killed in Ecstasy and it
differs a lot from the two other movies. It's also one of those Franco films
that looks less thought through, cheaper and yeah, sloppier. We have the
traditional hotel garden standing in for a jungle, there's editing that even I
can do better - sometimes - and uglier lighting. It's easy to see that the
heart of Franco wasn't involved all the time, this was a normal gun for
hired-project.

Still, quite entertaining and a nice cast. A cozy feeling, a movie to look at
when you're very tired and just want to see handsome and cool people walking in
and out of hotel rooms doing nothing special.

Thursday, July 26, 2012

This
starting to sound very repetitive, but Sinner - Diary of a Nymphomaniac is yet
another film by Jess Franco that literary stunned me with it's quality. Made
for the same producer as Countess Perverse, another fine movie, this Robert de
Nesle production is totally opposite when it comes to atmosphere and concept.
Countess Perverse is a stylish, comic-book, sleaze-movie and Sinner is another
dark, strongly sexual drama that feels very personal. After the death of Soledad
Miranda it seems like Franco changed his viewpoint on filmmaking for a couple
of years, the stories got more serious and darker, maybe even more depressing,
but also a lot more personal.

I don't
want to reveal so much about Sinner and how it begins, but it's a brilliant way
to start a movie and sets up for a downbeat story about a young girl's descent
into a living hell. Linda (Montserrat Prous) arrives to Alicante from a small village, with ponytails
and an innocent, childish dress. She drifts around in town until a man starts
to follow her, and it ends with him sexually abusing her in a Ferris wheel!
Soon after she ends up as the lover of Countess Anna de Monterey (Anne Libert)
and her spirals into a mess of sex and drugs... soon she can't take it anymore
and plans a revenge on the man that once raped her...

Sinner
feels so modern, so fresh. It feels like one of those French indie movies, very
arty, but never loosing it's grip around the exploitation parts of the story.
The beginning, especially, is among the best I've seen in a Franco movie. One
sequence is a loooong take of a man following Linda, handheld camera, in the
middle of the unsuspecting crowds. It ends in the Ferris wheel and a beautiful
edited sequence that shows nothing - but tells it all. Its rare, I think, to
see a morality tale from Uncle Jess, but here it is - the dangers of sex and
drugs, without getting annoying or stupid. It's just Franco's way to tell this
kind of story.

There's a
lot of nudity and sex in Sinner, which doesn't come as a surprise, but I must
say that the most impressive thing is the fine performances Franco gotten from
his actors this time. It's easy to sleep yourself through a sexploitation
movie, but everyone from Montserrat Prous as Linda to Howard Vernon in a very
edgy performance as a sleazy hippie-doctor makes very impressive jobs. Manuel
Pereiro, who plays the unlucky Mr Ortiz, gives his character some depth and
layers, instead of the normal sleazebag any other hack would transform him to.

Sinner is
one of those oddities that's hard to set a specific genre on, but I would say
it's a dark drama and one of the finest I've seen from Mr Franco. The DVD from
Mondo Macabro also makes the glorious cinematography by Gérard Brisseau shine,
in all it's brown and yellow shades, very seventies and very "here".
It very rarely feels like a movie, more a very intimate documentary about a
fucked-up life.

This is
another movie that once again proofs the genius and talent of Jess Franco and I
urge you all to buy it and support both the legacy of Franco and Mondo Macabro,
the distributor.

This is a detail that stuck with me since a teenager when I first saw Charles Band's Parasite, a message from the films cinematographer Mac Ahlberg: DJÄVLA ARSLE. Ahlberg, a competent Swedish director of sex movies and a very talented cinematographer. I have no idea how he ended up in Hollywood, but remember that the sex movies he directed (and shot) was big hits internationally also: Bel Ami, Justine and Juliette, Flossie, Around the world with Fanny Hill etc. Good stuff to, even I find them entertaining - but maybe most, to have stunning visuals. In 1979 he shot Nocturna: Draculas Daughter for producer Irwin Yablans and directed the terrible, extremely boring mafia movie Hoodlums - and from that moment he was stuck in the US and had a long and interesting (but far from perfect) career in b-movies with the occasional blockbuster in-between.

In 1982 he shot Parasite for Embassy Pictures and Charles Band and there he left is most Swedish mark ever, this graffiti. Cazzata is Italian, and means "bullshit" or something similar, but DJÄVLA (or DJÄVLAR, but there's a cross over the R, changing the grammar of the message) ARSLE means: Fucking Asshole. Or Damn Asshole, if you want to be less vulgar. I've always found it to be the highlight of this weak creature feature, even if it has nice slow-mo and one fun scene when the parasite crawls out from someones face.

I've always wondered why he (who else could it have been?) choose those words. Maybe it was just for fun, just a silly curse word for me to discuss on my blog eons after the movie was made. Or is it a message to the Swedish film community that treated him like shit? Like they've done even most talented Swedish filmmakers who never wanted to be a new Bergman, but just themselves instead. Maybe some fancy critics would say that it's a lot nicer to work in Sweden with art movies instead of monster movies for Charles Band, but they just lack the worldview that a film critic should have. Freedom isn't just about making fine dramas for the fine audience, it's also to entertain and shock the masses.

I think Mac Ahlberg succeeded in leaving Sweden behind him, even if the movies not always had stellar quality, his workmanship always kept high technical quality.

Wednesday, July 25, 2012

I'm not a
religious man, but if I was one I would turn Christian only to convert to Satan
directly. Just to make it feel right, because there's something seducing with
the religious form of Satanism, something... out of the ordinary. Plus cool
clothes, goatees, FUN supernatural powers, limitless sex and so on.
Christianity gave us one fine thing, and that's Satan and the creation of
Satanic horror movies. Eric Weston's Evilspeak is one of my favourites. It
might not be the most "realistic" one, but it takes the Satanic
rituals into the... hrmf... "computer-age" and this wonderful,
wonderful sleeper-hit.

Clint
Howard is Coopersmith, a nerd who's forces to join a strictly religious
military school after his parents died in a car accident. Soon he's the number
1 bullied boy in the school, and the pranks on him becomes more and more
serious. One day he finds a secret chamber in the basement. It's a sacrificial
temple belonging to the famous (and since long dead) Spanish Satanist Father
Esteban (played by the always cool Richard Moll) and now he wants back to the
world, and Coopersmith will help him - with his computer! Soon everyone's life
is at stake at the school, but hey - who cares, it's only fascist military men
and Christian hypocrites that will suffer!

Evilspeak
may take some time to get going, but compared to many other horror movies from
the eighties this also has a story to tell, and maybe even a message. First of
all, the stance against Christianity and military is so strong that I hardly
thing it's a coincidence. There's more or less not one single sympathetic
character (except one student, but he dies to I think...) among the
"enemy", they're all religious wackos, crazy fascists or homophobic
students. We really root for Clint Howard, aka "Cooperdick" - as his
bullies call him, and when the final punishment comes there's only glory to
Coopersmith, Esteban and Satan.

The scale
of Evilspeak is very ambitious, from the beginning set a few hundred years back
when Esteban sacrifices a woman to the sea (and hey, I always imagine it's Paul
Naschy playing the Esteban part - it would have been a perfect role for him!)
to the tough life at the academy and the cool underground temple...and the
final scene of gore, fire and mayhem. I have no idea what the budget was, but
everything looks big and impressive - but doesn't loose the trashier parts, the
violence and nudity. It's a big budget b-movie, and one of the best of its
kind.

What I
always forget is how damn gory Evilspeak is. First of all, the decapitations -
these must be the uncleanest and most brutal ever filmed. Good old Coopersmith
have a hard time aiming them right and often ending it all with destroying the
heads completely. Everything shot in glorious slow-mo and tons of blood. The scenes
of drama leading up to this final has a couple of very fine and gory kills
spliced in-between, for example the infamous pig-scene. MPAA, those
child-molesting sunuvabitches, demanded some trims - but it's still gory and
nasty.

I really
like - maybe love - Evilspeak, but it's one of those movies that demands a
re-watch from time to time, because it's hard to forget how good it actually
is. I always remember the slow-moving parts, but they belong there and they are
good.

Give me a
couple of millions and I will fund a sequel - because Coopersmith MUST RETURN!

Tuesday, July 24, 2012

Many
regards the 80's (and 90's, 00's, 10's....) the downward spiral of Jess
Franco's career. In a way they might be correct, because he started to make
more... utter trash. Porn, ultra-cheap action movies without any love or
passion. But here and there, in-between such movies as Falo Crest and Golden
Temple Amazons, Uncle Jess churned out some very personal and passionate
projects. One of them is yet another Orloff-movie, The Sinister Doctor Orloff
(not to be confused with 1973's The Sinister Eyes of Doctor Orloff). Like the
1987 classic Faceless this is another take on the Orloff-mythology and as usual
Franco blows me away with his talent. It's a f**king crime this isn't out on
DVD! So what's it about? Well, it's the same old story...

Alfred
Orloff (Antonio Mayans), the son of the legendary and controversial Doctor
Orloff, lives with his old father (Howard Vernon,
of course!) in a huge, spectacular house (created by Ricardo Bofill as usual)
in Alicante, Spain. In the basement his mother Melissa (Rocío Freixas) is
laying dead and frozen in time and he's obsessed with trying to resurrect her.
The old Orloff has given up, but Alfred wants to continue his fathers legacy by
stalking the streets after prostitutes to use in his experiments. Inspector
Tanner (Antonio Rebollo) is as usual around the corner, getting closer and
closer in his investigation!

Yeah, it's
a very basic premise and we've seen it in many the other movies directed by
Uncle Jess - but The Sinister Doctor Orloff goes further in creating a dark and
menacing atmosphere. The scenes where Alfred is stalking the streets in his car
reminds me a lot about Taxi Driver, but the similarities ends there. Everything
is drowned in an amazing score written and performed by Franco himself. It's a
mix between ambient experimental stuff and freaky and very alternative jazz.
Never heard anything like this in a Franco movie before, and it's just another
sign how different this production is.

While the
story is very traditional - Orloff lures a woman come with her and then his
literary eyeless brute Andros kills her, the
story is so filled of dread and darkness. The loveless relationship between the
bitter, insane old Orloff is a damn tour-de-force by Howard Vernon - very
low-key, hardly speaking a single line - but so powerful. But you know what,
the person who steals every scene is Antonio Mayans. It's rarely I write
something like that regarding him. He's a good actor, but often a bit
uninterested in his work - but here, wow... he's burning. Never seen him so
intense, so cold. The sadness because of his mother, maybe even a incestuous
feeling - something that seem to create a jealousy in hi father. This is
top-shelf Franco, with out a doubt.

The ending
is strange, odd, totally unexpected - and downbeat as hell.

This is
always how it ends. I watch a Franco and I get stunned by how good it is.
Franco is a smart man, one of the smartest people I've heard. But when he makes
movies it's more about the EQ than the IQ, the Emotional Quote. He knows which
buttons to push and he often gives a fuck about the small details. Why bother
with stuff no one cares about when he can create a movie based on the
wholeness, something very few other directors can.

The
Sinister Doctor Orloff look great with great cinematography, editing and
directing - not to forget the fantastic cast and original score. This is on my
top ten Jess Franco movies from now on and I wish more of you could see it.
Mondo Macabro, please... DVD?

Monday, July 23, 2012

The
slasher-genre is probably the only genre that is allowed to be like it always
been, without any changes. To criticize slashers is like complaining that the
ball is round, pointless. Slashers has always been the Coca Cola of movies - if
you experiment to much with new "exotic" tastes it just becomes
disgusting. Let it just be Coca Cola: unhealthy, sticky and generic. That's one
reason why I really love slashers from the late eighties. Because who the fuck
came up with the idea to make movies in this genre when it's been dying for so
many years? Already 81-82 it started to loose quality and everyone with a
camera and a couple of dollars made their own movie. But they kept going and by
the end of the eighties literary thousands of slashers has been made all over
the world, most of them not reaching further than the local city border.
Slaughterhouse (aka Pig Farm Massacre) is yet another of these late entries of
slice and dice's, an ambitious take on the Texas Chainsaw Massacre-concept,
made for a dime and with a lot of passion.

This is the
story of the Bacon-family. Not Kevin, but Lester and Buddy, father and son.
Lester is in deep trouble and might be forced to sell his pig farm, but he has
other plans for those who want him bad. That's where Buddy comes in, a big, fat
hairy beast of a man that only communicates through pig-like grunts and
screams. Lucky for them, because they kill to kill more people, a bunch of
over-aged teens thinks the farm is perfect to shoot their own little zero
budget horror movie, and Buddy gets a lot to do before the night is over!

Slaughterhouse
is so much fun and a criminally underrated slasher/horror movie from a time
when most movies of its kind just was sleepy imitations of Halloween and Friday
the 13th. Nothing wrong with that, I love it, but the creators of
Slaughterhouse puts a lot more energy and ambition into their little movie than
few other similar movies from the time. Atmospheric cinematography, cool
locations, and something that's so rare in these movies that even the rapture
seem more likely to happen: likable characters. The baddies are gross and
unsympathetic, but what to expect from a serial killer pig farmer, but as long
the victims feels like decent human beings, I'm happy and feel more interested
in the story more than usual.

On the
negative side, Slaughterhouse has some of that not so funny late eighties
comedy here and there, tossed into the story to liven things up. It rarely
works, and comedy in slashers should be forbidden anyway. I think we all can
agree on that, and if you don't agree you're a wimp. Nice anyway, but still a
wimp. I mean, the couldn't even stay away from a car-chase scene packed with
moronic country music á la any random Burt Reynolds-comedy before he became
untrendy and bought a crappier toupee.

Thank Satan
the kills are often nasty, quite graphic and slightly drawn-out, which balances
the stupid humour in favour of sadism and blood. It's primitive effects, but
works in that charming 80's way and has enough gore to entertain me, a
cold-hearted slasher fuck-up who's seen it all.

The Lucky
13 DVD I have is one of the oldest in my collection, printed in 1999. It's
probably OOP by now, but take a look at eBay or Amazon.com and I'm sure it's
waiting for you somewhere...with a big bone cleaver!

Saturday, July 21, 2012

Time for an
Australian film, Fair Game - which of course is not the same as the legendary
fiasco from 1995 with William Baldwin and that chick, whatshername, or that new
one starring Sean Penn and that other woman I can't remember the name of. They
all look the same anyway, women. Add a moustache or hat and it's easier to keep
'em apart. Anyway, Fair Game edited into that doc on Australian
exploitation-films, Not Quite Hollywood, but that short clip doesn't say much
about the movie itself, because it's actually not a bad movie. It's a damn fine
movie I would say, even if it has a boob-scene that looks very exploitative
when it's screened, but kinda fits in good to the rest of the movie without
truly being exploitation.

Cassandra
Delaney is Jessica, a smart farmer girl who (I think) owns a safe-heaven for
animals. One day on the road she bumps into three rednecks who almost forces
her off the road. She complains to the law, but no one cares, and soon the
rednecks is out for revenge - just for fun. So they kill her animals and
sexually abuse her (including putting her undressed in front of one of their
trucks, driving like crazies at the same time). When they're finished with her
they leave her... and now she's ready for her revenge! And it's gonna be brutal!

Every
Aussie movie seem to have car chases and this one sure has a lot of car-related
stunts, from the insane beginning - which has some very cool
climbing-on-top-of-vehicles-stunts - to the violent driving later, often with
one of the characters - who must have been a stuntman also - doing the most
dangerous stuff on top and around the car. Lotsa cool stuff. But this is mostly
a fantastic and very simple story about a woman who just won't give up. Cassandra
Delaney is great. This is the first time I've seen her, but she rules the
screen every time she's in frame - and she's visible most of the movie, in one
state or another.

The three
rednecks are three very distinctive characters, and all of them are extremely
annoying and unsympathetic. There's no try to explain their behaviour, and I'm
just thankful for that. Because this is a revenge-movie and there's not need to
forgive any characters or in any way feel form them. They deserves what's
coming. What's even more interesting with Fair Game it feels more like an
adventure than action, or survival-horror - but in bright sunlight instead.
It's a fresh take on the old story and it's odd that it's not more famous than
it is.

Maybe
because it's set in the Australian wilderness and the female character is so
strong and good? I think especially a male audience, and we all know that the
majority of men out there are assholes, just don't like a movie where we only
root for the woman. I mean, even in I Spit on Your Grave they have a weak
sensitive character, a male victim, that we actually feel for somehow (not all
of course, but the character is there for a reason - so the male audience won't
feel so bad). Forget that in Fair Game. Here you have three ugly motherfuckers
and one great lady.

A surprise
for me, a really good movie. Recommended to each and everyone who feels for
some "ozploitation".

Wednesday, July 18, 2012

Dan
O'Bannon is together with Larry Cohen my favourite screenwriter. If there's
someone I always feels inspired by it's O'Bannon, and it hurts a lot that I
never got a chance to meet and talk with him. What he did, just like Cohen, is
proving you can write about the most absurd subjects and concepts and still
make a good movie from it. An original movie, or just extremely interesting. I
mean, Alien isn't that original - it's a combination of earlier, older movies,
but set in the gritty seventies - but still in the future, and as a haunted
house movie instead. See, it's still original.
What O'Bannon did with frequent co-writer Ronald Shusett was to take
b-movies seriously, and that often made them better than typical mainstream
flicks. Dead & Buried was one of the first movies in the sub-genre
"Small Town With a Dark Secret" I saw and it still is one of my
favourites.

James
Farentino is sheriff Dan Gillis who lives in the small town of Potters Bluff. One day they find a badly
burned man in car wreckage, he's still alive, but so hurt that it's impossible
to communicate with him. Soon an identical man starts working at the gas
station and the original victim gets brutally murdered. More people die and the
good sheriff starts to think it's something very fishy in his little town. Is
there black magic involved? Is it eve impossible for people to die in Potters
Bluff?

Dead &
Buried is filled with mysteries and oddities and a great gallery of original
characters, just the work to expect from Dan O'Bannon and Roland Shusett. It's
hard to deny the Lovecraft-feeling over the story, but maybe it's the small town in Lovecraft's The
Shadow Over Innsmouth that's the inspiration, just like in Carpenter's The Fog,
Amando De Ossorio's Night of the Seagulls and official film adaptation like
Stuart Gordon's Dagon or Dan Gildark & Grant Cogswell's Cthulhu? Dead &
Buried certainly belongs in the same category - the dangerous conspiracy of a
small coastal town.

I think the
intimate atmosphere in small towns scares us all. I'm from a small town, and
lived in even smaller places, but I had to get away from there because of the
mental inbreeding. The sense that everyone knows who you are and what you're
doing. That's not style. That's the finest with this horror movie concept and
it still comes back from time to time. The countryside IS dangerous. Maybe not
in physical way, but like Cthulhu up here shows, it's a breeding ground for
racism, homophobia and just egoism - in a way that never happens in a big town.
I have nothing against small towns, but I prefer staying there at the most
two-three days.

Anyway,
this is one of many things that Dead & Buried deals with. But it's foremost
a horror movie, dealing with strange powers - or is it a new science? The atmosphere
is stunning, foggy and filled with an interesting feeling of dread - right
under the charming American gothic. Everything feels dirty, dishonest, and
still so cute and cuddly. It's hard to explain, but I see it like someone who
smiles without smiling. Just muscles moving, no meaning behind it. That's what
director Gary Sherman and the screenwriters created.

Most of the
grisly effects is done by Stan Winston, except one scene - and it's very
visible that it's not Winston who's done the effects. It's a cool scene, but
has none of the realism that you can see earlier or later in the movie. Overall
is a more grisly and nasty film than I remember it to be, which is good. I see
horror movies because I want to see horror, not family movies.

Dead &
Buried as a genuinely good twist, gore and blood and a great cast (watch out
for Robert Englund in a smaller part, and Lisa Blount - from Ruggero Deodato's
Cut and Run!). It's a very good and original movie and a perfect midnight
matinee, maybe a double bill together with Messiah of Evil...

Sunday, July 15, 2012

I've been
searching for eons, trying to avoid ever recommendation that said "Why
would you watch his movies? The best scenes is available on YouTube!". But
that's not me, no Sir. Imagine trying to be a fan of world weird cinema and
only seen a few seconds of Banglar King Kong on YouTube? That's not fandom.
Fandom is finding these movies and watching every damn minute of them. When it
comes to the legendary Captain Vijayakanth, still a very popular actor and
politician, it's been a bitch finding DVDs, but finally through some obscure
webstore I've already forgotten the name of, I found Raajjeyam! It's mostly
famous for showing up on blog-lists over the most over-the-top fight scenes in
Indian movies, and that's what people outside India have seen so far. Until now.

What's so
special with Vijayakanth is his appearance:

To be fair,
he was kinda cute in that slightly chubby Indian way in the seventies and early
eighties, but his potbelly, lobster-eyes and double cheeks is nowadays very
absurd and colourful trademarks for being an action star. I'm not saying this
is a bad thing, I love when people just refuse to understand that their best
years is behind them and continues to act like they're twenty again.

I pulled a
joke on Twitter that no one appreciated: "The reason why Captain Vijayakanth
have two cheeks is that he's hidden an extra fist in the lower one". Laugh,
goddammit!

Vijayakanth
(I'm gonna call him Captain for from now) is more or less Jesus, according to
the opening musical number (can't describe that ego trip, you have to see it
for yourself) and he's also the owner of security firm. The Captain is probably
THE single best catcher of criminals in his part of India and uses all his fighting
skills, often totally over-the-top martial arts and strenght (he stomps in the
water during a fight down in the sewers and flushes up the baddies by the power
of his stomp!). He also has a very nice mute brother who's in love with a girl
who don't want him. Anyway, through some totally unbelievable circumstances his
mute brother ends up in prison and gets mixed in some serious business that...
well, I'm not gonna tell you, because Raajjeyam is so filled with stupid (yes,
stupid) twists and unlikely storylines that it's hard to understand. It all ends
with the Captain going on a revenge-rampage!

To
understand Raajjeyam you have to understand the Captain. This is, and I'm most
of his movies is, a long love letter written by the Captain to himself. Without
any shame at all. The ego-orgy in this movie is so fantastic that Tom Cruise
comes off as a shy and submissive person in comparison. Captain is the most
perfect human being in the world, he's sensitive and cries, but still knows how
to round-kick twenty people at the same time. He's like Chuck Norris but with
talent and charisma. And yes, you're correct: he can't fight, but pretends to,
which means he's superior in every way to the movie-molester Norris.

Actually,
Captain Vijayakanth is a really lousy actor and it's a sight to behold to see
him act, or play smart, or cool, or funny. But that makes this glorious three
hour epic filled with romance, drama, slapstick, music, bloody squibs,
self-glorification and martial arts so much fun.

There's
four big fighting-scenes to look forward too. All four goes on forever and gets
more and more spectacular for every minute they goes on. The Captain sure knows
how to kick people all over the room, or make triple-triple somersaults over
people and show it from five different angles, often in slow-motion. One fight
is set in a ladder-factory and turns out to be a really fun and creative action
sequence, with lots of way to take people out with hitting a ladder to their
head. It has four or five musical numbers, and most of them is quite decent,
especially if you wanna see semi-naked Indian hairy men dancing and smiling
like there's no tomorrow.

This movie
has so many silly highlights and it makes me wanna find even more Vijayakanth
movies. If someone has ANY idea where to buy DVDs with him, please let me know.

Saturday, July 14, 2012

Japanese
cinema has for me mostly been Kaiju-movies and Sonny Chiba. I've never been so
much into samurai-movies and the recent Sushi Typhoon-production is just pure
crap. I'm not a novice by any mean, I've seen a lot of Japanese movies but it
has never been my area. But what I've realized is that the 70's cinema of Japan
is something special, like most of the world during that time. The Inugami
Family is one of the best and then we have Village of the Eight Gravestones,
the Hanzo-films etc. Stuff filled with originality, violence and controversy.
Three ingredients that's very important for me. My pal Jon in Norway sent me
package a little while ago, and Curse of the Dog God was included. I've heard
about it since earlier, but this was the first time I was able to actually see
it. And oh boy, this is one original ghost movie...

I team of
experts searching for Uranium finds a big heap of at a sacred mountain. On
their way up there they accidentally destroys a small spirit house and then
even more accidentally hits a dog! One in the team is getting married also, to
a village girl, but the owner of the dog - a little boy - throws stones at him
during the wedding. As a revenge. Back in the big city strange things starts to
happen and soon people around him is dying. His wife is afraid the he's gonna
die to, from the curse of the dog god, and goes slowly mad! He takes her back
to the village for an exorcism, but it all ends with her dying! THEN shit hits
the fan and the Dog God is furious, setting out to kill and destroy!

Wattya say
about that set-up? Impressive? Yeah, and it works! I had no idea what this
movie was going, and I couldn't in my wildest imagination see a subplot of
rapist-wannabe motorcycle hooligans, a flying dog head, a giant drill running
amok and so much other weird stuff. Not to mention the traditional female ghost
with black hair, but here she's really nasty and violent!

Curse of
the Dog God is a beautiful movie, packed with Japanese nature and landscapes,
all in ultra-widescreen. The blood is RED, the violence is corny but borders to
nasty and it's totally unpredictable. Lots of superlatives here, but this is a
great movie - one of the best Japanese movies I've seen in long while. When
Sushi Typhoon is churning out bullshit they should look back in time to their
own countries past and see how to make original and bizarre genre movies for
real and not just like simple, cheap, childish jokes.

But fuck
Sushi Typhoon. Why does Curse of the Dog God work, with it's absurd premise and
killer dogs, nudity, explosions and ghosts? Just because it's serious. I can
guarantee that most movies works good when they're serious and the filmmakers
actually trying to make something good out of it instead of joking around like
another jackass. The Asian countries has always been experts in making serious,
absurd and crazy, genre movies and most of them still do - even Japan
sometimes. I like, as a part of the audience, to be taken seriously. And when
the filmmakers respect me I'll respect their movie. Sure, there's of course
pure horror comedies - but that's a whole different thing.

Lots of
rambling in this review, but it's because I'm not sure what to write about
Curse of the God Dog. It's that original and should be experienced instead of
being a silly review at Ninja Dixon. Now my lust for watching Japanese cinema
has awoken once again. Lets see what else I find in the collection...

Friday, July 13, 2012

It's Friday
the 13th! But I guess you all know this. I never reviewed a Friday the 13th
movie on this day, never - but I always want to, because I love that franchise.
Yeah, I know, it represents the cheapest and most shallow of all horror-series,
but it still works after all these years. I even like the latest sequel/remake,
I think Jason goes to Hell is fantastic and I love the Vs movie. My favourites
is part 2 and 4, but the first one is a slasher-masterpiece. But everyone else
is writing reviews about good old Jason, so I have to do something different.
First I was trying to get my hands on some of the fan movies that's been made
over the years, but no luck there. Then something reminded me of one of the
first DVDs I ever bought, Unmasked Part 25, a British deconstruction of the
slasher-genre, especially the Jason-movies!

Jackson
(Gregory Cox) is bored with life. So he has left his old hunting-grounds, a
camp in the US
where he roamed the forests like a wild animal after his mother died. He's
tired of killing camp counsellors. So he goes back to London where his father still lives, but it's
hard to stop killing. After slaughtering a whole house of partying trendy
British youths he meets a blind woman, Shelly (Fiona Evans) and she's so kind
and nice the he decides not to kill her. They start dating and she loves him
even if he has a deformed face and prefer wearing a hockey mask outside the
house. But the almost automatic lust for killing won't stop and Jackson is torn between
living a normal life and killing stupid partying kids...

Unmasked
Part 25 was directed by the mysterious Swedish director Anders Palm, who I've
been trying to find for an interview for may years now. He also directed
another interesting movie that I haven't been able to locate, Murder on Line
One (also from 1989) and seems to have moved to Canada, at least for a while.
According to the IMDB he was involved in Swedish documentary a few years ago,
but it can be another Anders Palm - it's not a rare name in Sweden. Anyway,
Unmasked Part 25 is an interesting try to deconstruct the slasher-genre with
telling it from another point of view but with the same clichés. Similar things
have been done lately with Tuck and Dale vs Evil, The Last Lovecraft, Cabin in
the Woods and so on.

What's a
bit sad is that it only partly works. The beginning, the set-up to the romance
is excellent and brings some spectacular and gory death scenes, which promises
a smart twist on the legend of Jason Voorhees, but soon it stumbles on it's own
ambitious and slows down and yeah, enters the world of pretentiousness. It
picks up at the end again, with some gory murders and the depression of Jackson when he knows
exactly what's his victims is gonna do when they see him. It's not fun with
murders anymore. The final image is very ironic, a man trapped in his own
destiny - and here we ask us the questions if he's a real person or a character
who managed to escape from the world of movies.

It's an odd
movie, very arty outside the murder scenes and with thick British accents both
making it fresh and hard to understand at the same time. It delivers on the
gore-front anyway with cool deaths and graphic violence. Lots of blood and
often lingering a bit too long on the victims, which makes me surprised that
the BBFC didn't cut anything from this UK DVD.

It's not a
bad movie, but in the end suffers from being a bit too anxious of not being
taking seriously and therefore added a bit too much student film melodrama.

Thursday, July 12, 2012

If you
wanna see a dark drama this year, pick up a copy of Jay Lee's Alyce, just
released here in Sweden
by Njuta Films. Like my dear friend Cinezilla once wrote, if I knew that this
movie was directed by the same director as Zombies Stripper I probably wouldn't
have given it a chance. Not that Zombie Strippers was that bad, it's charming
tongue-in-cheek zombie movie with lots of boobs. But that's about it, nothing
more. And often that's not enough for me. I need something extra, some extra layer.
Depth, as some pretentious people say. Alyce has all of this and it's a
surprising departure from Zombie Strippers, and that's all I need to gain faith
in a filmmaker.

A brilliant
Jade Dornfeld is Alyce, a office worker who's best friend Carroll (Tamara
Feldman) is a egocentric bitch - but not really that. She obviously care for
Alyce, somehow, deep inside. After a terrible evening out clubbing Carroll is
dumped by her boyfriend and they goes home to Alyce, or more correct: up on
Alyce roof to escape reality for a moment. An accident happens and Carroll
falls of the roof! Alyce, in her drunken depressed state don't know what she
should do and locks herself in her apartment. Later a police officer knocks on
the door and Alyce decides to lie and say that Carroll probably took suicide...
and adds a story around that - until she understands that Carroll isn't dead,
just very wounded. The guilt of lying and afraid of being caught in her lies
drives her slowly into madness...

I wouldn't
call Alyce for a horror movie, except it's slightly connected to Lewis
Carroll's Alice
in Wonderland, but that's something I won't analyze. Read Cinezilla's review
for example in that case. It's instead a very fine mix between a drama and a
very dark comedy and it's pure joy to see Alyce go deeper into the shit, and
also very painful. Her drug addiction gets worse and worse and her friends
alienate her. Alyce is instead more bitter because Carroll treated her so
badly, which is even more painful because Alyce is in love with her.

When the
use of drugs escalate, the madness also gets more intense. She gets stuck in
front of the TV, who shows how fucked up the world is and soon she decides to
do something about it. Deleting those that treated her wrong, in very violent
ways.

Alyce is a
tour-de-force for Jade Dornfeld, who lives every scene like I've seen very few
do before. She's both extremely funny and disturbing at the same time and
manages to pull of a fine dramatic performance in the middle of it. The
supporting cast is great to, and it's always a pleasure seeing character actor
veteran Tracey Walter show up as Alyce's annoying landlord. Another fine return
is James Duval, who once seemed to be destined to be a big star, but has kept a
low profile in tons and tons of indie movies. He's still extremely active (just
check his IMDB filmography) and I hope we will see him in bigger movies and
smaller well-distributed movies like this.

Alyce might
not be a typical Ninja Dixon movie, but it's still a fine movie and you should
check it out. The Njuta Film's DVD looks wonderful, and for you others I'm sure
it's available on DVDs in your country to!

Wednesday, July 11, 2012

Like my old
friend Joachim use to say, without Christianity we wouldn't have all these
fantastic satanic horror movies that was made in the seventies, and to that
degree I'll agree with him. The best thing with most of them is that "the
evil" wins in the end, which makes them even more interesting. Several of
my favourite horrors from the seventies takes its cue from Satan, stuff like
Holocaust 2000, The Omen, The Sentinel and now The Devil's Rain proves that
that good old devil still is one of the finest baddies we have on the screen.
He's terribly underused nowadays, except in crappy Exorcism-themed movies where
he looses in the end. Not good. So why don't take the time machine back to the
middle of the seventies when a fantastic cast of characters put on their red
robes and did some good ol' devil worshipping!

A violent
thunderstorm. Mark Preston (William Shatner) waits, together with his mother,
for his father to come home. And he does, but only manages to utter a warning
that Corbis wants his book back - and then melts graphically into a puddle of
wax. Soon after a demonic force attacks their house and the mother (Ida Lupino
of all people) is kidnapped. Mark goes after them and comes to Corbis (Ernest
Borgnine) hide-out, in the desert. When he's not coming back his brother Tom
(Tom Skerritt) starts to investigate and is soon trapped in the nasty claws of
a dangerous sect of Devil worshippers!

I really
didn't believe it, but The Devil's Rain is one of the coolest and best satanic horror
movies I ever seen. It has that typical dirty, realistic feel of the seventies
but never shy away from melting people, Belsebub-make-up on Borgnine,
explosions, more melting people and lots and lots of cool satanic symbols and
awesome red robes with even more satanic symbols on them. Finally someone
understood that a movie about good vs. evil doesn't have to be boring, it can
be like every other movie from this time: just fucking crazy.

To make it
extra cool and probably to add some nice flavour to the marketing our dear
Anton LaVey is credited as a technical advisor and also shows up, very short,
as a high priest during the final. I'm sure he enjoyed this a lot, especially
because a movie like this basically was an excuse to poke fun at nutty religious
people (as you know, LaVey was an atheist and used the legend of Satan to
create a self-help ideology, but that's a whole different story). The movie
looks spectacular and Robert Fuest's directing is flawless. How he uses the
open spaces around the satanic church, how he delivers in the effect scenes -
this is a master at work.

Another
fine thing with this movie is the cast. First of all, Ernest Borgnine gives it
ALL as Corbis, and seems to enjoy his performance like no one else. William
Shater (another very underrated actor) is excellent and so is the entire
supporting cast. I find Tom Skerritt a bit pale, but maybe its because the
extremely colourful surroundings. It must be hard playing the straight man when
Borgnine and Shatner chew's the scenery right behind you.

The Devil's
Rain is a fantastic horror movie and if you stayed away from it because you're
silly like me, watch dammit. It's very good-looking, filled with slimy effects
and actors who crawls out from the telly because they acts so much. In a good
way of course. The DVD from Dark Sky looks very good. Get it!

Fun fact: Ernest Borgnine didn't use any make-up for his performance as Corbis. He just wrinkled his face a little bit more.

Fun fact: John Travolta made his last really good performance in The Devil's Rain.

Fun fact: Anton LaVey's chick golden helmet became a short-lived fab in California between July 28th and July 29th 1975. It was a roaring success among the "in-crowd".

Tuesday, July 10, 2012

The 80's
was a special decade, a decade of horror movies that obviously had a younger
audience in mind. You have more kid-friendly stuff like Gremlins and The Monster
Squad, movies that still manages to be far more adult and interesting than
movies for kids nowadays. Then you have flicks like Silver Bullet, Fright Night
and even Troll 2! With young actors in the leads, starring in movies with
violence and gore, foul words - and still having that cool youthful imagination
that 2011's Super 8 tried - and succeeded - to generate. Watchers, one of the
few Dean R. Koontz movies who's been produced, is also one of these odd hybrids
of full-blown horror and entertainment for older kids. It also got three
sequels, all produced by Roger Corman. Gonna get to those someday, but tonight
it's the original movie and nothing else!

A secret
lab is destroyed in a explosion and two creatures escapes from there, a
hyper-intelligent Golden Retriever (what else, this is a Dean R. Koontz story!)
and a ultra-violent hairy monkey-something-beast who wants to kill the dog.
Anyway, the dog - named Furface later - takes shelter in a car belonging to a
young Corey Haim (who also was the star in Silver Bullet by the way...) and
they instantly fall in love - in a non-sexual way of course. But guess what?!
The monkey-something-beast is after them and starts killing everything that
comes in it's way! A government official, the forever-bad guy Michael Ironside,
is also on the hunt for both the dog and the monkey-something-beast and he's
also one of those fuckers that stops for no one!

Watchers is
more or less a child of it's time. It couldn't have been made earlier or later,
it's just a very typical eighties kiddie-horror with some gore, violence and
bad language. And it's also quite good. It was years and years ago since I read
the original book so I have no idea what's left, but the storyline is very
typical for Dean R. Koontz: very straightforward, a damn dog and a monster
killing lots of people. It might be annoying with a smart dog (the second worst
to a precocious Japanese kaiju-kid!), but at least it's not playing basket or
using a skateboard!

I've
mentioned gore a couple of times, but it's not that gory actually. But still an
okay amount of bloodshed and nasty human remains. The attacks are vicious and
violent and that little hairy critter is sure hungry for human eyes! A couple
of squibs and a little bit and a little bit of that makes it a bloody movie,
but never extreme. It was enough for me, mostly because I like monsters and
even a monster movie without a drop of blood can be worth watching.

Michael
Ironside is a good baddie, as usual, but does his routine in his sleep here and
never feels as dangerous as he should be. But he's good, no complains really.
Corey Haim was a good teenage hero and carries the whole movie on his back,
which is something I rarely acknowledge when it comes to stars in his age. But
this was also a time when the roles in genre movies was a bit meatier and less
childish. They took the young adults serious instead of spoil them with
McDonalds-chewed easy watching crap.

And have
you noticed how strange a dog looks if you looks at it for a longer time? The
eyes! The eyes! It's a like deformed freaky human on four legs and a constant
urge for disgusting food! Which reminds me of my wedding night... but that's a
whole different story.

Monday, July 9, 2012

I'm not
sure where it actually started, the birth of the revenge-movie - maybe with Wes
Craven's The Last House on the Left in 1972, a version of Ingmar Bergman's The
Virgin Spring from 1960. Death Wish maybe, 1974? Or it just started because it
felt natural, a good way to continue the gritty new style of cinema. Death Wish
wasn't the only revenge movie released in '74, Bo-Arne Vibenius classic They
Call Her One Eye came out and the film of the evening, Karate Girl, a Turkish
rape-revenge who actually have some minor similarities to One Eye! Like another
Turkish classic, Cellat, this is actually a very good movie that mixes the
realism with total craziness and this makes it one of the better movies in the
genre I've seen.

Blond
bombshell Filiz Akin is Zeynep, a mute girl who lives with her aging father at
a farm. One day five criminals, who just escaped from prison, invades the homes
and kills the father and rapes Zeynep. Because of the shock of being raped, she
regains her speech and decides to take revenge on the criminals. With the help
of the friendly hobo Murat (Ediz Hun) she learns to be en expert shooter,
manages to take a brown belt in karate and sets out to kill them all - but
wait! Murat is actually an under-cover cop who wants to help her, but with the
law on his side! One thing leads to another and in the end Zeynep becomes a cop
to take down the last of the rapists!

I know,
that sounds like the whole story - but believe me, like good old Bollywood and
Thai movies from the 70's the story is so packed with details, intrigues,
twists and I don't know what, that this is just a part of the adventure. Karate
Girl (aka Kareteci kiz aka Golden Girl) is a fine movie with a frantic pace!
I've never seen a character evolve so fast in a movie, and learn so much - I
guess it all took a couple of years if we should think realistically, but that
would be boring!

I think
this is the first time I've seen Filiz Akin, and now I want to see a lot more.
She's both a great actress and looks stunning handling a gun or kicking
baddie-ass. I think she has a very slim male stuntman during the worst fights,
but she's still so damn cool that it's hard not to admire her skills. Ediz Hun
is also a likable hero and a good actor, a guy I would like to see more of -
anyone can recommend me more titles with these two?

The
similarities with They Call Her One Eye is quite small, but it almost seems
like someone - maybe a producer or investor - saw One Eye at some festival
(maybe Cannes?)
and asked someone to write a screenplay with a mute chick who's raped and then
takes revenge on the criminals - but first learns to handle a gun and do karate,
and that's it. It would have been nice with a rip-off, but it's even better
that it stands on it's own legs and becomes a movie of its own.

Did I
mention I loved the martial arts in this movie? It's nothing perfect or
spectacular, but hard-hitting and brutal. More rough and less fancy. Like it
should be, if it's not Tony Jaa, Jackie Chan or Iko Uwais of course.

I got a DVD-R
of this from Micke at MonkeyBeach, the best little movie store in Stockholm. He probably
knew I would love it. You should visit his store sometime and also see this
movie if you're into Turkish action and random revenge movies from all over the
world!

P.S! Jack posted some nice covers and artwork at his blog, go there dammit!

Dean R.
Koontz - a name both makes ordinary people happy and hardcore literature fans
sad and whiny. Almost anyway. I read a lot of Koontz as a kid and sometimes I
think back to his books with fondness. Maybe you who are his fans might think
I'm unfair when I claim he's a poor mans Stephen King, but with an unhealthy
obsession with golden retrievers. That's not a bad thing, because when King
sometimes starts ranting for 100 pages about a small detail Koontz explains
that with a few paragraphs. Successful movie adaptations of his novels has
never taken off - it started with the nice Demon Seed and since then it's never
been the same really. So that's why I'm gonna write about one of my favourites,
Phantoms - a monster movie for the Scream-generation starring Ben Affleck, Rose
McGowan and Liev Schreiber. And Peter O'Toole of course, close to 120 years old
when he made this flick.

Lisa and
Jennifer, two sisters, arrives to their old hometown only to find everyone gone
or butchered in the must macabre ways. Luckily for them 13 year old sheriff Ben
Affleck shows up with his perverted necrophilia-interested deputy Liev
Schreiber to save the day - but hey, it won't take long until everyone - except
the stars - is dead and buried and Peter O' Toole enters the story. He plays a
speculative journalist obsessed with "The Ancient Enemy", the unknown
force who's responsible for all the mass disappearances through the ages. And
FBI think it's this force, a giant worm-like energy and brain-sucking monster
who's behind it all! Now they have to overpower the monster with intelligence -
and a lot of shooting at random scary objects!

Phantoms is
actually a really trash big budget monster movie who steals (I don't remember
how original the novel is) from a lot of other movies, but that's just fine
with me because I want monsters and mayhem, tentacles and slime - and giant
insects, and blood and harmless gore. That's why this movie is so damn good in
it's own little way. That infamous (I know some forum-geeks hate that word,
because they have no imagination themselves to understand what a "great
atmosphere" can be in a movie) atmosphere is actually good to, which is
odd coming from the weakest part in the Halloween franchise, Halloween: The
Curse of Michael Myers.

Talking
about stealing scenes - there's stuff that's almost identical to John
Carpenters The Thing, Chuck Russell's The Blob and, believe it or not, Joe
Dante's The Howling - the last scene to be more exact. Hardly not an original
idea, but I always confuse these two bar-scenes with each other.

But
Phantoms still manages to be it's own good movie and even if all the actors
playing cops looks around 20 years too young, they're doing fine. Ben Affleck
shows already here what a good charismatic (yes, that's 100 % true) actor and
hero he is. It would have been easy, like - more or less - Schreiber to joke
away the movie, be more over-the-top and silly, but Ben does what he does good
here and he's a good anchor for us in the audience. Peter O'Toole, I love the
guy, but it's quite obvious here that he's not really "in" the movie.
He's having troubles delivering the dialogue convincingly, probably because
it's very silly and unconvincing - except in the last little speech he as
before the final monster-showdown. That's good stuff.

Once again, this is an underrated movie. It's a lot
of fun, has nice monsters and tentacles and a story that goes directly to the
mystery and action without a boring set-up. Is this out on BD? I would love to
upgrade my crappy Swedish DVD!

Saturday, July 7, 2012

It took me
some years to finally sit down and watch The Devil's Men (aka Land of the
Minotaur), but when I got my hands on Scorpion's new DVD release I had to use
some of my savings (and believe me, that's not much at all) to buy it. Even if
Peter Cushing is a brilliant actor and an awesome character my favourite actor
in this movie is the always enjoyable and colourful Donald Pleasence. He often
did better work than Cushing in these obscure horror-jobs and took the chance
to really use everything he learned as an actor and twist it a couple of times.
Cushing mostly looks tired. Anyway...

Young
couples is disappearing in Greece and when friends of a priest (Pleasence) also
gets lost he sends after his friend Milo (Kostas Karagiorgis), who's a random
tough guy/private detective/man of mystery/whatever. Milo
starts an investigation and soon find out that more couples has disappeared
over the years, and everything is connected to the old pagan temple who's
around the corner. Is the suspicious Baron Corofax (Peter Cushing) involved
somehow? Is he the leader of an ancient cult worshipping the Minoatur? Well,
guess.

Most
reviews I've read is quite negative, and in a way I can understand them. The
script is all over the place, the direction is uneven, the actors ranges from
really good to just very, very bad. BUT The Devil's Man also has a lot of
atmosphere and a imaginative storyline filled with human sacrifices, nudity and
bored acting by Cushing. Everything involving human sacrifice looks excellent,
with sect members in colourful capes, a fire-blowing Minotaur statue, even some
blood - and yes, the traditional fisheye objective to make everything look a
little bit more distorted and fucked up, a nice seventies tradition.

Another
fresh idea is to make the priest a really nice and fun guy, who enjoys young
people and joking - good food and maybe some flirting, and still takes his job
seriously. It's a nice departure from all the stiff priests I've seen. Only
Donald Pleasence could have done it and it wouldn't surprise me if he created a
lot of this character himself.

I've seen
gorier movies than this one, but it has a couple of stabbings that looks okay
and a sequence when several characters explode in pieces of blood, dust and
flesh. That's about it. But the general style of the movie and the wild script
makes it better than it people say it is. Another very odd thing is the score,
composed by Brian Eno of all people! The song over the end credits is extremely
good, I love satanic 70's rock - but I highly doubt that it's THE Paul Williams
singing, it's very far from his voice and style. Anyone have an mp3 of this
track?

The only
bad movies are boring movies. This was a little bit boring, but overall a very
fun and entertaining piece of Greek trash from the golden years. The DVD from
Scorpion is, what I've heard, an "uncut" version that differs
slightly from the other DVDs out there. I have no idea what's missing, but I'm
so naive that a trust people and it's better I recommend this version to be on
the safe side.